Rails, Ruby and Ruby on Rails

I'm a little bit confused about Rails, Ruby and Ruby on Rails: Rails and Ruby are different languages? Can I use just Rails or just Ruby? Why do we have Ruby on Rails? Can't I only have Ruby running by itself, without Rails?

Originally posted by Rogerio Kioshi: I'm a little bit confused about Rails, Ruby and Ruby on Rails: Rails and Ruby are different languages? Can I use just Rails or just Ruby? Why do we have Ruby on Rails? Can't I only have Ruby running by itself, without Rails?

Ruby is the language. Rails is the framework and some supporting libraries, implemented in Ruby.

You can use just the Ruby language but you can't run Rails without Ruby just like you can use just the Java language but you can't run Struts without a JVM.